2

Beginnings in Adelaide

Well, they were a pretty poor family and I think like everybody else, just wanted to make a new life and some of them migrated and hoped for the best when they got here. But conditions weren’t the best. They had to take any job that was available at the time because I think it was around the Depression time, so they just took what work they could.

—Bruna Semola nee Zampin, 2016¹

Bruna Semola nee Zampin confirms that her father, who arrived in Adelaide as a 17-year-old in 1928, was from a poor Veneto family—the second son to migrate to Australia. However, she acknowledges the ‘new life’ was not better than the old one. After arrival in Adelaide, the first generation faced the challenges of the Depression, unemployment, racism and the uncertainty of existence in Australia, competing for what little work was available in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Within 12 years, they were confronted with the impact of their classification as ‘enemy aliens’ during World War II.

Plate 2.1: Bruna Zampin at far right with, from left, Angelina Marchioro, Amelia Zampin nee Shaw (Bruna’s mother), Maria Ballestrin and Angelina Compostella, Adelaide, c. 1955

Source: Photo supplied by Zampin family.

The restrictions of Australia’s immigration policy, with its focus on homogeneity, impeded acceptance of non-British ‘aliens’ in the difficult economic period during which Silvano Zampin and other veneti struggled to exist in the early years.² They were forced to find work in rural locations in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland. The early migrants endured separation from family and home in Italy and tolerated the impact of the Depression in Australia alone, without resources, including the English language.

The first generation arrived without education or skills that might have made it possible to occupy jobs in industry or trades or even in the catering roles that many Greek migrants accepted between the wars.³ The Veneto migrants had no safety net in terms of income, accommodation or emotional support. They made the transition from an ordered life in an intergenerational household as contadini (peasant farmers) in the Veneto region to the peripatetic life of labourers in their first years in Australia. The first generation of the Veneto market gardeners were intent on achieving sistemazione, the process of settling and establishing themselves in a new country. As individuals, they wanted to find a measure of security before they could establish their families. Sistemazione was a primary goal for Italian migrants in adult life and provided the motivation to become independent through marriage, own a home and raise a family.⁴

From the Veneto to Lockleys

The first generation of the Veneto market gardeners—the 19 adults who arrived in Adelaide—comprised two main groups: married men who had left wives and children in Italy and single men. Among the cohort was a young married couple with an infant. For all but one man, who did not marry, the key strategies of sistemazione included earning an income and finding stable accommodation. The men who arrived alone realised that family reunion or marriage were foundations for remaining permanently in Australia.

The Veneto market gardeners were not a homogeneous group of Italian migrants. They originated from villages in eight different comuni (municipal areas) in the Veneto.⁵ The two most distant were about 50 kilometres apart—a considerable distance in the days of travel by horse and cart. In addition to the various locations of origin, the differences in age and marital status of the cohort on arrival indicate the diversity of their life experiences, although all were from contadino families who had worked the land for generations. In her study of contemporary migrant families in market-gardening businesses in outer Sydney, Sarah James explains that networks develop through their shared occupation as market gardeners despite not having a ‘pre-migration’ relationship.⁶

Map 2.1: The provinces of the Veneto region

Note: Most of the Veneto market gardeners came from the province of Treviso and three originated in Vicenza.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_region_of_Veneto,_Italy,_with_provinces-it.svg).

The migration and settlement patterns of the Veneto cohort diverge from the model of chain migration documented in many histories of migrants. The veneti did not follow the practice in which relatives or friends from the same village were ‘called’ by one of their own who had met with some success in the new country. In that model, settled migrants assisted the newcomers on arrival, often living in concentrated settlements based on kinship and employment. Between the wars, some 93 per cent of southern Europeans arrived through chain migration.⁷ It was a feature of Veneto migration and settlement patterns in other parts of Australia.⁸

While they did not arrive through chain migration, this small cohort of Veneto migrants developed a geographically and socially contained community. One second-generation narrator explained the kinship ties that linked people in the community as ‘relatives’. Lina Campagnaro nee Ballestrin spoke first about her parents and their close ties with other Veneto market-gardener families. She also referred to the continuity of the connections in her generation—a phenomenon that has been part of the family culture.⁹ The godparent relationship is considered as close as a blood relative:

Oh, everyone around the area would have been their friends, the Ballestrins, the Piovesans, the Marchioros, the Zampins, the Tonellatos, the Bernos, everyone around that area were friends and then they were all related in some way with being godparents to their families … But you know what? We still do the same, we still interact because I have got lots of Veneti friends … And we’re all related, godmother, godfather and so forth.¹⁰

Plate 2.2: Veneto families and paesani, Lockleys, mid-1940s

Source: Photo supplied by Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo.

Limits of land and migration

All 19 Veneto adults who arrived in Adelaide in the late 1920s were members of contadino families. Some had inherited land but most had been raised in intergenerational family households in a semi-feudal contractual arrangement called the mezzadria. This Latin-derived term explains an agrarian, feudal-like economy in which the padrone (proprietor) provided accommodation and owned the land but it was cultivated by the contadino.¹¹ The padrone received half of all annual production including crops, livestock and other foodstuffs. In either case, landholdings were small in the Veneto, with rare opportunities to expand the family economy. In his interview, Lino Tonellato, who arrived in Australia as a child, remembered the challenge for his mother, Elisabetta, to manage the land and support and feed herself and five children for eight years after her husband, Secondo, emigrated to Australia in 1927:

I remember going down there and help her to weed the corns and … then they used to make bread with it, that’s all. That’s the only bread we had out of corn … Oh yeah, there was poverty alright, yeah … [T]hat’s why we couldn’t eat polenta. Do you know what that is? We like it now, but it took us thirty years before we’d start eating it [laughs].¹²

Some families on inherited properties had barely enough to support members in a multigenerational household because the land was continually carved up by successive generations.¹³ The inadequate means of living, poverty and lack of resources were factors in the decision taken by individual family members to emigrate, hoping for a life better than mere subsistence.

Healthy, young men in Veneto households often gained seasonal employment in neighbouring countries such as France, Switzerland and Germany and added to the family economy. For the Veneto people, this was ‘an inherited and accepted way of life’.¹⁴ In addition to the seasonal emigration to nearby countries, Veneto men had also emigrated before World War I to the Americas, Africa and Australia. Donna Gabaccia estimates that before World War I approximately 9 million people born in Italy were living in other countries including in Europe.¹⁵ Several narrators referred to male relatives who had migrated to other countries to find work between the wars. For example, in Dino Piovesan’s family, apart from his father and uncle, who had migrated to Australia, other uncles went to Belgium and Venezuela.¹⁶ Lino Tonellato asserts that ‘most of the young people left’.¹⁷ Lino’s grandparents died at a young age and left the family in poor circumstances. All but one of their children emigrated before World War II; Lino’s father and his youngest sister migrated to Australia and another aunt and two uncles went to Canada.

Plate 2.3: The Rossetto family, Bigolino, Italy, c. 1918

Note: Eight of the nine siblings migrated as adults between the wars.

Source: Photo supplied by Maria Rosa Tormena.

Most southern European migrants in Australia were young single men who were fit and able to travel and negotiate prospects for employment. Until 1939, fewer than 10 per cent of southern European migrant men were accompanied by wives or children.¹⁸ Those in the Veneto group who were married had left behind children—some of them so young they had no memories of their father before migration. When Secondo Tonellato migrated in 1927, his wife, Elisabetta, was pregnant with their fifth child.

Another way of augmenting the family income in the Veneto region was a gendered form of ‘out’ employment that involved daughters being sent away to become domestic servants in wealthy households. Lina Rossetto nee Bordin gave an account of her experience working in domestic service from the age of 12, looking after a small child and attending to all household cleaning and laundering.¹⁹ Daughters were less independent than sons in the patriarchal family structure; sons had some autonomy about undertaking seasonal work. In the tradition of outwork, Veneto families accepted the absence of members of the household and the compensation was the supplementary income and fewer members at the table.

While the limitations of land and poverty were among the reasons for the Veneto market gardeners migrating in the late 1920s, political circumstances also caused problems for some families. Political unrest impacted the daily life of Italians in both urban and country areas between 1919 and 1920 in the aftermath of World War I. Strikes by industrial and agricultural workers increased during these two years and led to protests and unrest in what was called biennio rosso or the ‘two red years’.²⁰ Groups of armed men (squadristi) perpetrated violence and, in this way, fascist influence spread during the 1920s.²¹ With Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922, the hold of fascism strengthened and expanded and, consequently, some Italians left the country as ‘political refugees’.²² Most narrators did not refer to fascism as a reason for their parents’ migration but it had become part of the political, social and economic context of late-1920s Italy.

Albert Tonellato recalled being told about the impact of fascism on his extended family and the fear that existed because local groups of violent fascists imposed control on communities. Albert communicated the complexity and distress of life in a small village and relationships divided by the political regime:

[My father] could see what was going on. Because of my mother’s brother … the two brothers—they were against the Fascists, and one of the Fascists was a friend of his. He said, ‘You’d better take off, go somewhere else, or else they’re going to kill you.’ They used to go and pick them up. The Fascists, they was going to go and pick him up … and he said, ‘You’d better take off’, he said, ‘Before the truck pulls up.’ And they went—from the Veneto region, they went to France, walked through the mountains.²³

Migration, legislation and sponsorship

The migration and settlement narratives of the first generation of Veneto market gardeners in the late 1920s are considered in the political context of both Italy and Australia. Selective migration policies were developed and amended as governments changed.²⁴ During the 1920s, Italian migration to Australia increased because of the quota system introduced by the United States, which severely reduced the number of Italian migrants accepted there. In Australia, there was a threefold expansion of Italian migrants between 1921 and 1933 and an even greater increase in South Australia, which increased racial tensions as competition for employment heightened.²⁵ In Italy, the fascist government had restricted emigration as part of its nationalist campaign in the late 1920s,²⁶ yet it was during this period that the Veneto cohort of market gardeners arrived in Australia.

The White Australia policy, enacted in 1901 to maintain a homogeneous British society, determined the climate for the reception of Italians who arrived in the 1920s.²⁷ At that time, several requirements were imposed by the Australian Government. Intending Italian migrants had to be nominated by an Australian resident, who was obliged to provide accommodation and employment to relieve the state of the responsibility for the material support of the immigrant population. Migrants were required to pay a considerable landing fee if they did not have a sponsor and Italian passports were restricted to dependent relatives. In 1928, by which time the 19 veneti had arrived, an annual national quota of 3,000 migrants from Italy was introduced.²⁸

Although the narrators were unable to provide information about the cost of their parents’ migration, it seems it was common for Italian men to borrow money for the voyage or for whole families to contribute to the expenses. The costs were considerable for families who lived on the margins of poverty in the Veneto. In 1924, passage from Italy to Australia cost £37 at a time when a man’s average annual wage in Australia was £94/3/0.²⁹ Most in the Veneto group arrived with £10, although the exception was Giovanni Santin, the eldest of the cohort at 41, who arrived with £20—undoubtedly the result of having worked in Canada for nine years. These meagre financial resources did not bridge the difficult economic conditions the migrants faced in South Australia in the late 1920s.

The 17 lone men who arrived in Adelaide in the 1920s conformed to the common pattern of Italian migration in which a man arrived without a spouse.³⁰ Unaccompanied men were more likely to take work opportunities anywhere they could find them. Wives emigrated later or the men married in Australia after establishing a firm financial base. Francesco and Margherita Marchioro, the sole married couple to migrate, were advantaged because Margherita’s brother, who owned a concrete business, sponsored them and provided employment and assistance with boarding house accommodation after their arrival in 1926.

Leaving security

When members of Veneto families travelled for seasonal work to neighbouring European countries, they returned to the stability of the intergenerational household. The long sea journey from Italy and disembarkation in Australia broke this pattern. For these people, the voyage, the physical and emotional separation from family and their arrival in a foreign land with a different language were unfamiliar challenges. Author Tony De Bolfo, whose grandfather migrated from Italy with two brothers in 1927, examined the records of 110 passengers who disembarked from the Re d’Italia in Melbourne in November 1927.³¹ He recorded oral history interviews with surviving passengers in the late 1990s. In the following excerpt, one passenger provides an image of the privations of the 46-day journey from Italy:

The voyage was very, very bad; the food was awful and I was sick the whole time. As everything was rationed for the long and arduous journey we were fed a lot of soup but hardly any pasta, which was awful, and as the ship was loaded with heavy cargo there were almost no individual cabins and my sleeping quarters comprised a very large room of thirty people or more.³²

Ampelio Acquasaliente (Salent) from the Veneto province of Vicenza recalled his desolation when he arrived in Melbourne and his sponsor was not present to meet him because he had travelled to New South Wales to seek work after nominating Ampelio. It was 14 years before they met each other, by which time Ampelio had worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland. The challenge for some migrants was to navigate the new country alone without support from a sponsor, government or trade union. The Australian Labor Party did not support the level of ‘alien’ migration in 1927 and was concerned about the increasing numbers of southern Europeans whose sponsors, if unable to offer wages, provided food in return for work. The argument was that the migrants would lower the industrial conditions that unions had fought to establish.³³ While some Veneto groups who settled in other parts of Australia had the support of paesani (people who came from the same village) through chain migration and were provided with work and accommodation, most Veneto market gardeners did not experience that security.³⁴

Negotiating the first years

The contrast of the safety net provided by the family household in the Veneto region with the instability and risk of a forced itinerant existence could not have been more complete. The sponsorship system may have provided a proxy safeguard for new arrivals and given them more security had the economic conditions not been so difficult in Australia in the late 1920s. While a mix of ‘friends’ and relatives were identified as sponsors on landing documents, it is difficult to understand how the arrangements advantaged the first generation of the Veneto men. The sponsors lived in the City of Adelaide in boarding houses, many of which were owned by veneti who had arrived in previous years.³⁵

The boarding house addresses suggest that sponsors were not market gardeners and were therefore unable to offer work. Providing the name of a sponsor did little more than satisfy an administrative requirement. After arrival, the Veneto cohort likely became part of the network formed through the boarding houses. Yet, without work, the new migrants had to leave their sponsors to pursue any opportunity that arose. Even kin could not protect them from the dire economic situation, as illustrated by the experience of Vittorio Marchioro, who was sponsored by his older brother Francesco in 1927.

Vittorio’s survival was tenuous because he was forced to move interstate alone to find work:

Oral Historian [OH]: But for three years you had no steady work?

VM: No money at all, nothing, nothing.

OH: What did you write back home?

VM: Oh, crying here … Because you know, left, no friend, girlfriend, came here, no work, no nothing.

OH: Did you meet, were there other Italian people here?

VM: Plenty Italians, nobody work.³⁶

Plate 2.4: Vittorio Marchioro’s landing papers, December 1927, which include the name and address of his brother Francesco

Source: National Archives of Australia (D4880, ‘Italian, Marchioro, V.’).

The repetition of ‘nothing’ and the acknowledgement of his tearful desperation communicate the deprivation and hardship that Vittorio endured as a 21-year-old. Vittorio had initially worked in a terrazzo and concrete business with his brother-in-law but employment opportunities in Adelaide were unstable and he travelled to Rushworth in Victoria, about 200 kilometres north of Melbourne, where he felled timber in difficult conditions that he recalled vividly in his interview.³⁷ The work was physically demanding; he endured isolation, the privations of restricted access to food and poor accommodation, and recalled with a sense of irony that his employer was a fellow Italian.

Vittorio may have recognised his boss in the role of a padrone in the semi-feudal system of rural Italy who demanded rights to the production of crops in a structure that maintained inequality. He earned £5 for six months’ work when, in 1930, the average Australian weekly wage was £5/1/5 for adult men.³⁸ Vittorio returned to Adelaide in the early 1930s and gradually made an income from labouring work before the opportunity to lease land for a market garden at Lockleys with his brother and sister-in-law offered a more secure future.

Enduring the Depression years

Vittorio’s experience was consistent with that of the thousands of men who were without regular work during the Depression in Australia. Not speaking English and with no knowledge of Anglo-Australian culture, migrants were even more disadvantaged than most. The scale of unemployment among newly arrived migrants is recorded in a memoir by Giovanni Amadio, who arrived in Adelaide from Italy in 1927. He stayed in a boarding house with 47 other Italians, ‘all of whom, to my great disappointment were out of work’.³⁹ In South Australia, nearly one-third of the potential workforce was unemployed by 1930, and the situation did not improve until 1935—a longer period than in other states and territories.⁴⁰ Italians were unwelcome whether they looked for work in the city or in rural areas. Attempts to find work in the country were noted in South Australian newspapers with provocative headlines such as ‘Country Invaded: Italians Seek Work’.⁴¹

Most of the Veneto migrants became wage labourers after arrival, which was a model of work that differed from their experience of belonging to a peasant farmer household and economy in their home region. Short-term employment included labouring on farms, building rural roads or working for farmers in a relationship familiar to the veneti who had worked on the land for padroni (bosses). Using a snapshot of Eugenio Zalunardo’s life, it is possible to track his mobility in his first 10 years in the country. Arriving in Adelaide at 22 years of age in 1927, Eugenio spent more than seven years in rural South Australia, mostly working as a farmhand. He worked for four years on Kangaroo Island, two years on the Eyre Peninsula, which was more than a day’s travel from Adelaide, and 14 months at Halidon, 140 kilometres east of Adelaide, working for a Veneto man who had a contract to build roads. When he applied for naturalisation in 1933, Eugenio was unemployed and living in a boarding house in the City of Adelaide. By 1937, he had leased land on Grange Road, St James Park, for his market garden, close to other veneti who were also settling there during the second half of the 1930s.⁴²

Learning about the experiences of the first generation

Most sons and daughters of the first generation born in Australia recollect their everyday lives on the market gardens and in the Veneto community although they have limited knowledge of the early experiences of their parents in Australia. Francesco (also known as Frankie) Ballestrin holds the memory of his father’s difficult first years after arrival: ‘I didn’t witness it, but that’s what I was told by my parents, anyway, by my Dad.’⁴³ He demonstrates that extraordinary or distressing events can become imprinted through emotions—a conclusion made by Hirsch in what she observes as the ‘trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience’.⁴⁴ The experience of Francesco’s father, Isidoro Ballestrin, provides an impression of the impact of the Depression on a young Italian migrant.

The 23-year-old Isidoro undertook work near Finke, in a remote desert country about 1,500 kilometres north-west of Adelaide. With another Italian man, he laboured on a pastoral lease, living in tents. Francesco describes the extreme situation his father was in:

In the beginning there wasn’t any work at all … My father, Isidoro, went up north, up at Finke, up that area, sinking wells and building fences for the farmers, and actually the chappie that he went with—I don’t know who he was—but he hung [sic] himself. And Dad panicked and he got lost, no water, and the blackfellas found him, the Aboriginals, what you want to call them—at that time they used to call them ‘blackfellas’—and they gradually got him back to life again because he was almost gone. And then he come down here and I don’t know what he did after that, I don’t know what he picked up after that. But I know he kept saying … that it was really horrendous.⁴⁵

Plate 2.5: Isidoro Ballestrin’s Italian passport, 1927

Source: NAA (A435 1947/2/2012, ‘Ballestrin Isidoro—born 15 May 1905—Italian’).

Plate 2.6: Isidoro Ballestrin’s work registration card, issued four months after his arrival in Adelaide

Source: Card supplied by Francesco Ballestrin.

The reference to Aboriginal people as saviours is unusual in the collection of oral histories as Francesco is the only narrator to mention such an encounter with Indigenous people. The scene provides a counterpoint to the image of urban Aboriginal people, especially in the Depression years, when they were the most vulnerable group in Australia, together with itinerant labourers and newly arrived migrants, on the margins of society. At 71 years of age, Francesco remembered what he was told and, in reconstructing this episode, he imagined his father’s near-death experience as a young man and his salvation at the hands of Aboriginal people—a dramatic chapter of his family’s migration history.

Francesco’s report of his father’s interaction with Aboriginal people endures as ‘a fragment’ of what Persian and Agutter discuss in relation to the views of European postwar migrants towards marginal groups in Australia. An account like Francesco’s stands out because it forms a fragment of history that does not reflect the general contemporary attitude towards Indigenous people.⁴⁶ It also is distinctive in this project because other narrators did not refer to their Veneto parents or grandparents encountering Aboriginal people.⁴⁷ A second-generation woman expressed surprise after reading about the use of land in the Lockleys market garden area in a blog that was posted on the Veneto market gardeners’ website, which acknowledged that the land the Veneto market gardeners occupied along the River Torrens had been first inhabited by the Kaurna people for thousands of years. The woman had not considered that the land had been owned by people in precolonial history and appropriated by colonial settlers.

In another context, Veneto men and women who lived and worked in the mica mines in the Northern Territory before and after World War II provided photographic evidence of close contact with Aboriginal groups in the mining camps. Oral histories were recorded for a project about Italians in the mica camps. Women who lived in the camps remembered productive relationships that were characterised by ‘mutual respect and co-operation’, which were not common in Central Australia at the time.⁴⁸

Plate 2.7: Attilio and Serafina De Pieri and other workers, Caruso mica mine, Central Australia, 1941

Source: Photo supplied by Adelina Pavan nee De Pieri.

As noted by scholars, acknowledgement of First Nations people and their sovereignty has been consistently overlooked in the narratives of migrants.⁴⁹ Ricatti asserts that this absence or ‘silence’ in the literature about relationships between Aboriginal people and Italians ‘is a significant aspect of the complex and unresolved question about the racial and colonial role played by migrants in Australia’.⁵⁰ Ricatti argues that migration is a challenging experience because the migrant has conflicting encounters with what is unfamiliar and a sense of nostalgia for what was familiar. However, Italian settlement must be considered in the context of dispossession and colonialism mixed with racism.⁵¹ This complexity is also examined in the context of multicultural Australia where the dispossession experienced by Aboriginal people and the problems of colonial settlement are subsumed by a focus on ‘the racialised hierarchy of Australian whiteness’.⁵²

The second generation interviewed for this project narrated their parents’ experiences and generally did not consider the question of Indigenous sovereignty. By the time the first generation leased their land in the Lockleys area in the 1930s, Indigenous people had long been supplanted by colonial-settler farmers and there would have been few opportunities to meet Aboriginal people in the Italians’ circumscribed lives as market gardeners mixing almost exclusively within their own community. Especially in the first years, the first-generation Veneto group was challenged by the unfamiliar in many contexts and, as the experience of Francesco’s father demonstrated, they were driven, as members of a marginal group, to survive and maintain their focus on settlement at a time of national economic crisis.

Electing to stay in Australia

The impact of the Depression contributed to the high percentage of Italian migrants who re-migrated. Large numbers of Italians left Australia in the late 1920s and early 1930s and returned to live in Italy. It was estimated that more than one-third of the 12,000 Italians who migrated in the interwar period had returned to Italy by 1940.⁵³ However, those who remained persisted in their ambition to settle in Australia and endured negative public opinion about Italian migrants. Some Italian men made short trips to Italy to choose wives, reunite with family or sell land and returned to Australia intending to remain permanently. Four of the Veneto cohort visited Italy for brief periods within seven years of arrival and returned to Australia—a demonstration of their commitment to achieving sistemazione. Adeodato Rossetto returned to Italy for six months in 1931 and resettled in Adelaide. He had arrived in South Australia in 1927 with two brothers and a brother-in-law, and the reason for returning to Italy cited in his application for naturalisation in 1933 was ill health.⁵⁴ Three other men who returned to their home village to find spouses in 1934 resumed life, with their respective wives, in Adelaide after eight months.

Finding stability in the paese at Lockleys

The Veneto market gardeners (and narrators) applied the name ‘Lockleys’ to the area where they established the market gardens and developed their community. Although the suburb of Lockleys was on the southern side of the River Torrens, there is a tradition of also referring to the locality north of the river where the market gardeners settled as Lockleys. It is not a correct geographical location.⁵⁵ Flinders Park and St James Park were the names of the two suburbs when the Veneto market-gardener families settled there. One possible reason for using the name ‘Lockleys’ was because the nearest post office was located there. The post office, for the veneti, was important as the point of distribution of mail to their families in Italy at a time when the post was the most common form of contact between families in Italy and Australia.⁵⁶

Plate 2.8: Aerial photo of the Lockleys area, late 1950s

Notes: The location of the Veneto market-gardener properties is highlighted. The River Torrens, seen at the bottom of the photo, was an important feature of the area.

Source: City of Charles Sturt, reproduced with permission.

Oscar Mattiazzo, a 1.5-generation relative of a market-gardener family, clarified the enduring identification of the locality:

We called it Lockleys because that’s the area we refer to, although it’s Flinders Park and Findon and all that type of thing. There wasn’t so many houses there, a lot of gardens, and a lot of empty spaces, many empty spaces, and it wasn’t until, let me see, until 1960 that things started really to develop in Lockleys, and market gardens were being cut up for blocks of land and all that type of thing, until today.⁵⁷

The tendency to assign names to identify the meaning of a place that has a large population of Italians can create a sense of belonging to a locality.⁵⁸ The use of a special name evokes an identity that assists people in creating their own history of a place.⁵⁹ The Veneto migrants had other geographical markers such as roads that indicated clusters of market gardens. Narrators also pinpointed the locations of Frogmore Road, Valetta Road and River Road (or Findon Road as it is today). These markers communicate a sense of local knowledge, familiarity, proprietorship and an identity associated with the longevity of the Veneto community in the area. Some narrators referred to the River Torrens as a significant feature of the area—both as a source of water for those who lived beside it and as a boundary at the southern margins of the Veneto market gardens.

During the 1930s, 17 of the 19 Veneto migrants, including the married woman, became market gardeners in the Lockleys area within about 3 kilometres of one another. Although the narrators did not know the reason for their parents’ convergence on land at Lockleys, the two Berno brothers provide a clue. They had worked as labourers for an Anglo-Australian who owned farmland near the River Torrens. As plots in the area became available for lease, they may have communicated these opportunities to other Veneto men in the city boarding houses. The chance to lease land enabled the Veneto market gardeners to reclaim a sense of order and control over their everyday lives and facilitated the continuity of their contadino identity in Australia.

At first, the Veneto men lived alone in various basic forms of accommodation on their land. Living alone but setting up a home for a nuclear family was another unfamiliar aspect of life for people who had always lived and worked in large intergenerational households. In Adelaide, the sense of isolation, separation from family and ordered domestic life, mixed with uncertainty about the future, provided impetus for attaining the goal of sistemazione.

Stability through marriage and family

Those who experienced the challenges of migration and desired permanent settlement generally sought stability through the institutional structures of marriage and raising a family—‘a family migration strategy’.⁶⁰ Although most Italian male migrants arrived alone, they reunited with wives after some years or married after they had achieved the stability required to form a family and attain sistemazione in Australia. The first-generation Veneto market gardeners carried an image of the household in which all labour was provided by family members.

The experience of the peasant household was dependent on the number of members, ‘family composition and its labour force’.⁶¹ The marriage of young family members had an impact on labour, domestic arrangements, interactions between men and women and relationships between generations.⁶² However, Veneto rituals of courtship and marriage were not easily transposed to Lockleys. For example, a young woman in the Veneto would usually have married a young man from the local area after a priest had vouched for his reputation. In Adelaide, there was no such regulation of marriages.

Within eight years, the four married Veneto men had reunited with their wives and children at Lockleys. Another six men married through different arrangements—some by proxy—while others, like the three Ballestrin men, returned to Italy briefly to find suitable women to marry. At Lockleys, some Veneto men took much longer to attain status as husbands and fathers. One possible explanation for the delay was the small number of women in the Italian community in Adelaide. According to the 1933 census, only one in five South Australians born in Italy was a woman.⁶³

Arrival as a family unit: Francesco and Margherita Marchioro

The exception in the marital arrangements of the Veneto group in the first years was the married couple Margherita and Francesco Marchioro, who landed in Adelaide with their infant daughter, Mary, in February 1926. Margherita’s brother, who had arrived in 1922 and developed a terrazzo business in Adelaide, sponsored them and guaranteed work for Francesco. Living as a family unit with an income enabled the couple to put down roots, although they moved between four different boarding houses in search of cheaper rent in the first years after arrival.⁶⁴ Within 18 months, a second child, Lina, was born, increasing the incentive for sistemazione and permanency. By 1931, after completing the mandatory five years of residency, the Marchioros were the first of the Veneto market-gardener families to become British citizens.

In her interview, Lina thought her parents intended to return to Italy and recalled an incident that, in her mind, related to the option for her parents to re-migrate:

While they were living in the city in Waymouth Street, my mother told me that she was putting up some curtains and she was having difficulty and then she said: ‘Why bother? We’re going back in a couple of years.’ So, she puts the curtains aside [laughs] … God, she died when she was 97. She was 21 when she came to Australia.⁶⁵

Lina’s assumption about her parents’ plans to return to Italy contrasts with the lived experience of her mother, who never returned to Italy. After her husband died aged 43 years old in 1945, Margherita developed a profitable market garden and did not remarry.

Plate 2.9: Margherita and Francesco Marchioro with their first two daughters, Lina and Mary, Adelaide, c. 1927

Source: Photo supplied by Connie Legovich nee Marchioro.

Reuniting and creating families in Adelaide

The imperative to reunite and establish families required finance and certainty of accommodation. Four Veneto men who were married when they arrived in 1927—Brunone Rebuli, Domenico Rossetto, Giovanni Santin and Secondo Tonellato—reunited with their wives and children within 10 years. Thirteen children arrived and formed a two-generation community in the paese at Lockleys. The children completed compulsory years of education before undertaking full-time work in the market gardens with their parents.

Plate 2.10: Giovanni Santin pours drinks for his own and others’ children who had recently arrived from Italy, at Lockleys, December 1935

Note: The other children are from the Panazzolo, Santin and Tonellato families.

Source: Photo supplied by Assunta Giovannini nee Tonellato.

Returning to Italy to marry

Some Italian men returned to Italy to find wives even in the period between the wars. In the decade 1920–30, the average time between the arrival of southern European men and their marriage, either by proxy or during a brief return visit to Italy, was just over eight years.⁶⁶ After seven years in Australia, Antonio and Isidoro Ballestrin and their cousin Giuseppe Ballestrin returned to Vallà for eight months to find wives in the paese where they were brought up. The three marriages were conducted within 10 days of each other and, shortly after, the newly married couples left Italy to begin their lives together north of Adelaide.

The marriage of Giuseppe Ballestrin and Cesira Tieppo

Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin, the daughter of one of these couples, was 75 years old when she discussed the way her parents, Giuseppe Ballestrin and Cesira Tieppo, married in 1934. Norma described her father’s return to Italy as ‘hunting for a wife’, highlighting the generational differences in understanding the roles of women and men in the process of choosing a marriage partner.⁶⁷ Norma reflected on the risk her mother took at 20 years of age: marrying an unknown man, relinquishing physical ties to her family in Italy and migrating to a distant country.

Norma compared the experience of her daughter, Joanne, who moved from Adelaide to Canberra for employment as a young single woman in the 1980s. Referring to her own mother, Cesira, Norma revealed the differing generational values about the role and parenting of daughters and the experience of marriage:

[W]hen Joanne left home, my daughter left home, she went for a job, she went to Canberra. And my mother turned around to me, she said: ‘How could you possibly let your daughter move away from home to go to Canberra?’ And I said to her: ‘But Mum,’ I said, ‘You came over to Australia, you left your parents, your family. You came over to Australia with a strange man’, because basically she’d only met him and married him. And she said: ‘He wasn’t a strange man,’ she said: ‘He was your father.’ Okay [laughter].⁶⁸

Plate 2.11: The Ballestrin family: Cesira and Giuseppe, with children Norma and Lino, Adelaide, c. 1943–44

Note: A third child, Louis, was born in 1950.

Source: Photo supplied by Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin.

When Norma said ‘Joanne left home’ and amplified ‘my daughter left home’, she confirmed the reality of the separation. This contrasts with the expectation for adult children, especially daughters, to stay close to their parents. Norma’s elderly mother pointed out that the man she married after a short time was not just any man, ‘he was your father’, and illustrated the respect held for the role of parents—especially fathers—within the contadino family. Norma communicated the incongruity of the circumstances of her mother’s path to marriage in contrast with her own experience when, at the age of 25, she married a postwar Veneto migrant in Adelaide. She also revealed the story of her daughter’s initiative to move away from home and gain independence to pursue professional opportunities.

Two brothers marry after more than 20 years in Adelaide

Veneto contadino customs regarded unmarried adult men as lesser members of the community.⁶⁹ Although Alberto and Pietro Berno remained single men in the paese at Lockleys for more than 20 years, they acquired the status of leaders because of their hard work, prosperity, knowledge and financial experience. The brothers worked in partnership on a substantial landholding and owned the largest number of glasshouses of all the Veneto market gardeners, ensuring steady, substantial income and identities as successful businessmen.

After the interruption to overseas travel during the war years, the brothers visited Italy separately and became acquainted with women known to the Berno family in Riese Pio X and took the steps to marry them. Remo, son of Pietro and Antonietta Pastro, provided the perspective:

First my father, and then my Uncle, married but first they worked and they passed 20 odd years of having lived in Australia. So, they were able to stay here in Italy, you know, a year or seven, eight months to find a girl, to get engaged and get married. Dad was looking for a young woman that was able to have a family and who would accept migrating to Australia.⁷⁰

The brothers married in 1948 and 1951, respectively, and returned to Lockleys with their wives. The two couples lived and raised their families together in a large colonial house in Lockleys in circumstances that resembled the extended contadino households in their village of origin. While the brothers managed the market gardens, their wives rotated the weekly domestic roles and care of children with work on the land—an efficient way to organise the household and business, which, at times, was supplemented by employing other workers, including young Veneto migrants after the war.

Marriage by proxy

For some single Veneto men, proxy marriage resolved the problem of selecting a prospective wife from the small number of available Italian women in the Adelaide community in the 1930s and 1940s.⁷¹ Of the three men who married by proxy, two had known their wives before they migrated in 1927. In the formality of proxy marriage, the bride was partnered by a male relative, who stood in for her fiancé during a church ceremony.⁷² In the case of Gelindo Rossetto and Adele (Lina) Bordin, who married in 1930, Gelindo’s father represented the groom in the wedding ceremony in Bigolino. Lina recalled this arrangement in her memoir:

It was with a despondent enthusiasm that I prepared for my strange wedding with no husband. I was to marry my husband by proxy, by taking the hand of my father-in-law! The world can only imagine the trembling feelings of doubt and fear experienced by a young girl entering such a union. Village morality frowned on travel for unmarried girls so I had to submit to this loveless ritual in order to eventually be with Gelindo in Australia.⁷³

Plate 2.12: The formal photo of Lina Bordin’s proxy marriage, Bigolino, Italy, 1930

Note: Lina (with fur collar) sits between her parents-in-law, fourth from left in the front, as her father-in-law points to her.

Source: Photo supplied by Maria Rosa Tormena.

A second couple in the Veneto market-garden community, Angelo Piovesan and Rosalia Zanatta, had also known each other before their proxy marriage in 1934. If the woman and man were not known to each other, the man asked relatives in Italy to recommend a suitable spouse. A family member who knew the reputation of the prospective bride could make a recommendation—a process that reflected transnational patriarchal control.⁷⁴ Unlike those who returned to Italy to find a suitable spouse, a man who married by proxy reduced his costs by paying only a single fare for his wife.

Proxy marriage of Vittorio and Angelina Marchioro

The third example of a proxy marriage is a story of family origin recorded by members of two generations who provide accounts of the 1937 marriage of Vittorio Marchioro and Angelina Marchioro.⁷⁵ Interviewed in 1984, Vittorio and Angelina reflected on aspects of their proxy marriage. More than two decades later, their sons considered it an antiquated practice in contemporary Australia.

After remaining single for 11 years, Vittorio wrote to his sister in Malo in the province of Vicenza, asking her to recommend a young woman to be his wife. His sister endorsed Angelina, with whom she worked in a silk factory. Through letters, the couple communicated their interest; Angelina was 23 when she agreed to marry Vittorio. At 70 years of age, Angelina recalled contrasting emotions about her decision:

I worked with the sister, and talking, talking and getting sick of working in the factory and asked if you like to go to Australia. I said just for fun, I said: ‘Going to Australia’.⁷⁶

However, Angelina’s buoyancy contrasted with the realisation when she began the voyage by ship that she was permanently leaving her family: ‘This made me a little bit afraid … a long way to go. Can’t come back.’⁷⁷ Angelina recalled her arrival at the Port of Adelaide, where 40 Italians welcomed her. She spoke about living in a shed, starting work in the market gardens and beginning married life without knowing another person in Australia. When Vittorio was asked about marrying Angelina, he began by saying: ‘This is a story.’ It was as though Vittorio acknowledged the proxy marriage as drama and chance. Both Angelina and Vittorio laughed as they recounted their story—memories of their younger selves pledging to a future together and their long partnership in the market gardens.

When Angelina and Vittorio’s two sons discussed their parents’ marriage in their interviews, they posed questions about starting married life unknown to each other and the significance of this heritage. For example, Romano spoke about his mother’s decision to enter the marriage: ‘She got married in Italy and my father got married here … [I]t was like thousands of miles apart when they got married separately, virtually.’⁷⁸

Plate 2.13: Angelina and Vittorio Marchioro’s official wedding photo, Adelaide, 1938

Source: Photo supplied by Johnny Marchioro.

More than 20 years after his parents’ interviews, the couple’s older son, Johnny, aged 68, also reflected on the family story:

So, until 1937, Dad wanted to get married and probably letters were only written once a year, [laughs] and he wrote to Italy, to his sister in Italy and said that he wanted to get married … Then my mother—or-to-be-my-mother—came to Australia … She got married before, by proxy, but without seeing my father, and they lived together [laughs] for the next 60 years.⁷⁹

In the interview, Johnny was joined by his wife, Eleonora, and both expressed admiration for Angelina and Vittorio although they implied that the risk was greater for Angelina. Johnny acknowledged the ambiguity of proxy marriage in the phrase ‘my mother—or-to-be-my-mother’ and expressed pride in his parents’ long relationship. Johnny’s laughter combined curiosity, self-consciousness and incredulity. He also conveyed the difference in traditions and marriage customs between his parents’ time and the 1960s, when he and Eleonora married. Like his parents, Johnny married, and then he and Eleonora lived and worked together as market gardeners until retirement. In contrast to Angelina and Vittorio’s story of limited opportunities shaped by migration, the younger couple’s experience of meeting and marriage was characterised by independence and choice.

Marriages outside the community

In the early 1930s in Adelaide, two young Veneto men took the radical step to marry outside the Italian community and, in one case, there is evidence that it was condemned by some Anglo-Australians. On the other hand, the Veneto market gardeners seemed to accept the marriages even though they could have been considered a threat to the fledgling community at Lockleys. As Baldassar states: ‘Endogamy is important to the maintenance of community … “Mixed” marriages were perceived as threatening group solidarity.’⁸⁰

Silvano Zampin and Amelia Shaw

Plate 2.14: Amelia Zampin nee Shaw and Silvano Zampin, Adelaide, mid-1930s

Source: Photo supplied by the family.

Silvano Zampin was 21 years old in 1931 when he married 20-year-old Amelia Shaw, the daughter of Irish-Australian parents. Silvano had arrived three years before, sponsored by his older brother, Pietro, who had been in Australia for six years. The marriage took place a year after Pietro’s accidental death. Silvano’s need to put down roots in Australia was realised in a marriage that set the couple apart from other veneti in Adelaide. The marriage also placed Amelia in a challenging position because of the racism towards Italians in Australia at the time; her own family shunned her, reflecting the prevailing racist attitudes towards Italians. In their first years of marriage, Silvano and Amelia lived in boarding houses in the City of Adelaide. Children were born and Silvano worked for several gardeners, including a Chinese man, before they moved to Lockleys and leased land for their own market garden.

Six daughters of Silvano and Amelia who recorded oral history interviews reflected on what they understood about the challenges of marriage between an ‘Australian’ and an Italian in the 1930s and 1940s. The daughters remembered examples of racist attitudes that their parents endured because of their unconventional marriage, which had even more significance during the war years. The sisters recalled offensive and disrespectful terms used to describe Italians, who were identified as ‘aliens’. The young Irish-Australian woman and her Italian husband experienced generalised racism in the context of their marriage and the formation of their family in Anglo-Australian Adelaide.

On the other hand, without exception, the daughters remembered the high regard in which their mother was held by the Veneto community and recalled the close friendships made and regular social occasions attended by their parents. The acceptance of the marriage of Amelia to Silvano indicates that the Veneto market gardeners could accommodate an outsider and include her and the family in the community. One daughter affirmed the inclusivity of the Veneto market gardeners: ‘The Italians accepted her better than the Australians.’⁸¹ This acceptance could indicate the Veneto market gardeners’ transcultural response to new circumstances and adaptation to a sense of the future of the community in Australia, marked by an attitude of inclusivity towards the exogenous marriage rather than exclusion or rejection of Amelia and Silvano.⁸²

Gino Berno and Jean Dyson

Another Veneto man, Gino Berno, married outside the community in 1933. His wife, Jean Dyson, was the daughter of an Anglo-Australian market-gardener family who lived in the Lockleys area. Jean was 19 and Gino was 24 when they married. The couple and their two children shared a large house with Gino’s cousins, who were market gardeners for several years.

Marrying a relative of a first-generation Veneto market gardener

There was significance in a migrant’s choice of marriage partner and value in marrying a woman ‘known’ in the community. Even better was a wife whose family was from the same paese—a continuity of the Veneto tradition of choosing marriage partners within the local area. Sixteen years after arrival, Eugenio Zalunardo married Luigia Ballestrin, sister of the two Ballestrin brothers who had arrived in 1927. At the time of their marriage in 1943, Eugenio was 38 and Luigia was 27; she had migrated with her mother in 1938.

Plate 2.15: The marriage of Eugenio Zalunardo and Luigia Ballestrin, Adelaide, 1943

Note: The group poses for a photo in formal attire, conveying the sense of occasion even though it was the middle of the war.

Source: Photo supplied by Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin.

Adjustments to life at Lockleys

The Veneto migrants who arrived between 1926 and 1928 negotiated several major adjustments after leaving their family households in the Veneto region. First, they made the transition from their contadini origins to life as migrants. Second, they managed the uncertainties of beginning life in Australia as dire economic conditions impacted the population in every part of the nation and discrimination against Italians was widespread. Third, the men were compelled to become itinerant labourers—an unfamiliar experience even for people accustomed to seasonal employment. Fourth, the veneti made the transition from immersion in family in their childhood households to being alone and learning to survive on the margins of an intolerant society. The next most significant transformation was seizing the opportunity to lease land at Lockleys and establish market gardens. Finally, reunification or formation of families marked evolution to a new form of paese comprising nuclear family households. The first generation of veneti created working lives and homes on the market gardens with limited connections to Anglo-Australia. However, they used strategies that demonstrated agency and initiative in seeing the potential in becoming business owners and leasing land to develop market gardens as a livelihood. The early market gardeners displayed ‘transcultural identities’ in establishing themselves on the land.⁸³

The first generation adjusted core elements of Veneto life and contadino structures, creatively adapting Veneto culture in their new paese even when Anglo-Australian hostility towards Italians challenged their belief in a safe settlement. The opportunities at Lockleys to recast their affinity with the land, become market gardeners and build a cohesive social network as a paese are fixed threads in the history of the Veneto market-gardener community in the interwar years.

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1. 1 Bruna Semola nee Zampin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/39, 8 November 2016: 3–4.

2. 2 See Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005). For discussion of Italian migrants in South Australia in the 1920s, see O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid, 93–108.

3. 3 See Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 159–62.

4. 4 See Loretta Baldassar, Visits Home: Migration Experiences between Italy and Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 40–42, 160–67, 183–84; Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 36–37.

5. 5 In the province of Treviso, the comuni were Altivole, Castelcucco, Ponzano Veneto, Riese, Vallà and Valdobbiadene. In the province of Vicenza, the comuni were Malo and Monte di Malo.

6. 6 Sarah James, Farming on the Fringe: Peri-Urban Agriculture, Cultural Diversity and Sustainability in Sydney (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32235-3, 162.

7. 7 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 107–39, 278–89.

8. 8 See Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 33–37; Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti, 51–54.

9. 9 The custom of godparents as ‘a family alliance’ in successive generations is noted by Simone Marino and Giancarlo Chiro, ‘Family Alliances and “Comparatico” among a Group of Calabrian-Australian Families Living in Adelaide, South Australia’, Journal of Anthropological Research 70, no. 1 (2014): 107–30, doi.org/10.3998/jar.0521004.0070.105, at 147.

10. 10 Lina Campagnaro nee Ballestrin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/28, 13 March 2014: 7, 19.

11. 11 Huber, From Pasta to Pavlova, 20–21. See Remo Berno, ‘The Mezzadria System’, Veneto Market Gardeners 1927 Blog, 15 September 2019, venetimarketgardeners1927.net/the-mezzadria-system/.

12. 12 Lino Tonellato interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/10, 16 July 2010: 14–15. Polenta was made from corn or maize, which was a staple crop in the Veneto.

13. 13 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 27–28; Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti, 35.

14. 14 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 20–25.

15. 15 Donna R. Gabaccia, ‘Italian Diaspora’, in Encyclopedia of Diasporas, eds M. Ember, C.R. Ember, and I. Skoggard (Boston: Springer, 2005), 143–52, doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_15.

16. 16 Dino Piovesan interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/17, 23 September 2011: 2.

17. 17 Lino Tonellato, OH 872/10, 16 July 2010: 17.

18. 18 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 104.

19. 19 Marietta Rossetto, La Pioggia nelle Scarpe: Aneddoti di una protagonista = Rain in These Shoes: Anecdotal Memoirs of Adelina Rossetto (Adelaide: VIA Magenta, 1995), 61–62.

20. 20 Danilo Breschi, ‘Genealogia E Fenomenologia Do Fascismo: Entre a história E a interpretação [Geneaology and Phenomenology of Fascism: Between History and Interpretation]’, Locus: Revista de História 28, no. 2 (2022): 41–63, doi.org/10.34019/2594-8296.2022.v28.37466.

21. 21 John Foot, ‘A Microhistory of Fascist Violence; Squadristi, Victims and Perpetrators’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 27, no. 4 (2022): 528–49, doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2022.2045454; Alessandro Saluppo, ‘Paramilitary Violence and Fascism: Imaginaries and Practices of Squadrismo, 1919–1925’, Contemporary European History 29, no. 3 (2020): 289–308, doi.org/10.1017/S0960777319000390.

22. 22 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 46.

23. 23 Albert Tonellato interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/4, 3 October 2008: 27–28.

24. 24 Michele Langfield, ‘“White Aliens”: The Control of European Immigration to Australia 1920–30’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1991): 1–14, doi.org/10.1080/07256868.1991.9963375.

25. 25 O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid, 93–98.

26. 26 Philip Cannistraro and Gianfausto Rosoli, ‘Fascist Emigration Policy in the 1920s: An Interpretive Framework’, International Migration Review 13, no. 4 (1979): 673–92, doi.org/10.1177/019791837901300404.

27. 27 Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 50–53.

28. 28 J.S. McDonald, ‘Migration from Italy to Australia with Special Reference to Selected Groups’ (PhD diss., The Australian National University, Canberra, 1958).

29. 29 O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid, 3; Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 18 (Canberra: ABS 1925), 570.

30. 30 Borrie, Italians and Germans in Australia, 52–56; Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 104–13.

31. 31 Tony De Bolfo, In Search of Kings: What Became of the Passengers of the ‘Re d’Italia’ (Melbourne: HarperCollins, 2004).

32. 32 Ampelio Acquasaliente (Salent), in ibid., 33–36.

33. 33 ‘Question: Migration Commission—Mentally Affected Migrants’, 50-5, in Australia, House of Representatives, Debates, 15 November 1927, historichansard.net/hofreps/1927/19271115_REPS_10_116/.

34. 34 Annamaria Davine, ‘Pioneer Veneti in Gippsland and Their Role in the Development of an Italian Farming Community’, Italian Historical Society Journal 10, no. 2 (2002); Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 33–35.

35. 35 O’Connor, ‘Clubs and Associations of the Venetians in South Australia’, 179.

36. 36 Vittorio Marchioro interviewed by Michael Tsounis, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 12/1, 13 March 1984: 8.

37. 37 ibid., 9–10.

38. 38 ‘“Real” Wages Show an Increase’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 1932: 7.

39. 39 Joe Amadio, An Immigrant’s Story (Adelaide: Self-Published, 1997), 5.

40. 40 Ray Broomhill, Unemployed Workers: A Social History of the Great Depression in Adelaide (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1978), 11–29.

41. 41 News, [Adelaide], 2 January 1928: 1.

42. 42 Department of Immigration, Central Office, A446, Correspondence files, annual single number series with block allocations [Main correspondence files series of the agency], 01 Jan 1926 – 1955/50846, Application for Naturalisation—Zalunardo Eugenio born 18 February 1905, 1933–1955, National Archives of Australia, Canberra [hereinafter NAA].

43. 43 Francesco Ballestrin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/7, 5 January 2009: 46.

44. 44 Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, 106.

45. 45 Francesco Ballestrin, OH 872/7, 12 December 2008: 1–2.

46. 46 Persian and Agutter, ‘European Post-War Migrants and Indigenous Australians’, 112.

47. 47 This absence is consistent with Ricatti’s observation that First Nations peoples are almost completely invisible in most histories of Italian migration. Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 67.

48. 48 David Frederick Hugo, ‘Mica Mining at Harts Ranges, Central Australia, 1880s–1960: A Study of Ethnicity and the Impact of Isolation’ (PhD diss., Northern Territory University, Darwin, 1995), 290.

49. 49 Ricatti, ‘The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny’; Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 53–74; Pugliese, ‘Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context’.

50. 50 Ricatti, ‘The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny’, 126.

51. 51 ibid., 130.

52. 52 Susan Schech and Jane Haggis, ‘Migrancy, Multiculturalism and Whiteness: Re-charting Core Identities in Australia’, Communal/Plural 9, no. 2 (2001): 143–59, doi.org/10.1080/13207870120081460, at 153.

53. 53 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 26.

54. 54 Department of the Interior, [1], Correspondence files, annual single number series [Main correspondence series of the agency], 01 Jan 1890 – 31 Dec 1069, 1934/857, Adeodata [Adeodato] Rossetto—Naturalisation 1933–1934, NAA.

55. 55 Surprisingly, some official documents identified the area where market gardens hugged both sides of the River Torrens as Lockleys—for example, in descriptions of the locality in security reports during the war. In NAA files related to applications for purchase of property, both ‘Lockleys’ and ‘Findon’ were used to identify the area of the market gardens where the Veneto community lived. Today, it seems quite a fluid naming.

56. 56 An elderly second-generation narrator confirmed that the postman delivered mail that was issued from the Lockleys Post Office. He recalled that the Veneto families associated the physical location of the post office with the area from which the mail was delivered, so it became known as ‘Lockleys’. Lino Ballestrin, Personal communication, 17 August 2023.

57. 57 Oscar Mattiazzo interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/13, 6 June 2012: 169.

58. 58 Pascoe, ‘Place and Community’, 93–96.

59. 59 Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal 39, no. 1 (1995): 182–92, doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.182.

60. 60 Sala and Baldassar, ‘Time to Revisit the Family in Italian-Australian Studies’, 2.

61. 61 Stuart Oglethorpe, ‘The End of Sharecropping in Central Italy after 1945: The Role of Mechanisation in the Changing Relationship between Peasant Families and Land’, Rural History 25, no. 2 (2014): 243–60, doi.org/10.1017/S0956793314000089, at 255.

62. 62 Teodor Shanin, ‘The Peasantry as a Political Factor’, in Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings, ed. Teodor Shanin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973), 240–44.

63. 63 O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid, 108.

64. 64 Adelina Rismondo nee Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/9, 9 June 2020: 16. See also Department of Home Affairs [II] Central Office, A1, Correspondence files, annual single number series [Main correspondence files series of the agency], 01 Jan 1890 – 31 Dec 1969, 1931/6731, NAA.

65. 65 Adelina Rismondo, OH 872/9, 9 June 2010: 16.

66. 66 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 137–38.

67. 67 Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/37, 21 September 2016: 4.

68. 68 ibid., 5.

69. 69 Robert H. Evans, Life and Politics in a Venetian Community (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 118.

70. 70 Remo Berno interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/46, 27 June 2017: 5.

71. 71 See Susanna Iuliano, ‘Donne Buoi dai Paesi Tuoi [Choose Women and Oxen from Your Home Village]: Italian Proxy Marriages in Post-War Australia’, Australian Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 4 (1999): 319–35, doi.org/10.1002/j.1839-4655.1999.tb01083.x; Susi Bella Wardrop, By Proxy: A Study of Italian Proxy Brides in Australia (Melbourne: Italian Historical Society, CO.AS.IT, 1996).

72. 72 The legal aspects of the proxy marriage were organised by parish priests in Italy and Australia. The groom signed papers that were sent to Italy before the marriage.

73. 73 Rossetto, Rain in These Shoes, 65–66.

74. 74 Susanna Iuliano, ‘Choose Women and Oxen from Your Home Village’, 324.

75. 75 Although their family names are the same, they were not related.

76. 76 Angelina Marchioro, OH 12, 13 March 1984: 8.

77. 77 ibid., 10.

78. 78 Romano Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/20, 11 June 2021: 3.

79. 79 Johnny Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/1, 21 July 2008: 3.

80. 80 Baldassar, Visits Home, 254.

81. 81 Roma Bordignon nee Zampin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/41, 3 February 2017: 20.

82. 82 Riccati, Italians in Australia, 8–11.

83. 83 ibid., 10.